After several months of pain, sweat and tears I’ve finally wrapped up a first alpha version of my app! For this initial version I mainly focused on getting features working in a semi-usable way, which means it may look rough around the edges, but it gets the job done and in most cases relatively fast. As some of you may remember, we’ve measured over 30 dogs with each 24 measurements. Each measurement containing anything between 6 to 12 contacts, depending on the size of the dog. This leads to a total of about 7000 contacts(!) which I’ve manually assigned with labels for each paw (Left Front, Left Hind, Right Front and Right Hind). On top of that I manually assigned the location of each of the five toes, though I cheated by only calculating this for an average contact based on whether the dog was running or walking. Still this means 25 dogs, 2 types of trials, 4 contacts and 5 toes totally in around a 1000 toe positions. Note that the amount of dogs slightly reduced, because some of them were so small or light that it was impossible to discern any toes.

Now I bet you’re curious what this all looks like! Well I won’t keep you waiting any longer.

The Ribbon

I’m a huge fan of Microsoft’s Ribbon and luckily wxPython had its own version. So I was quick to add one myself, because it allows me to use tabs to switch between logical sections of my app and gives me large icons which make for easier clicking (due to Fitts’Law). While the current 48px are probably a bit overkill I’m still fairly happy with them. The only thing that bothers me is all the stock icons and the depressing amount of duplication. Worse, because I compressed so many functionality into one screen I’m also stuck with a huge amount of buttons.

Now this isn’t a fair comparison because I wish you good luck trying to insert subject info or manage a database with just one button, but that’s not to say there isn’t room for improvement.

As you can see, the main tab consists of 4 elements:
- Searching the database
- Adding subjects to the database
- Creating a medical history (anamnesis) based on tags (work in progress)
- Creating a session and adding measurements to the session

I think I’m going to reorganize the panel so when you start you basically get a Google like interface: search for a subject and you can get started. If you need to analyze new data then you press a button to add a subject and the other relevant buttons appear (making the ribbon context sensitive like Office) and display the panel to insert the data. Finished inserting a subject? Great we switch to the panel to add measurements. Want to add a more detailed medical history, switch the panels to display just those panels and adjust the ribbon.

Another reason for wanting to change the main tab is that this was literally the first code I wrote, which means it’s horrible. Even though I tried to maintain some sense of a MVC structure, but due to my limited experience I failed pretty badly and a lot of functions need to be untangled.

Processing the measurements

Now on to the more interesting stuff: processing the data.

Again the Ribbon is crazy crowded at the moment; this is because there are so many actions required to allow for a flawless and usable paw annotation. Imagine this:

Search for contacts

Refresh loads the average contacts from the database

Remove any contacts that are ‘incomplete’

Save the results when you’re done

Delete contact removes it from the list

Previous/Next Contact let you switch between contacts

Undo it if you make a mistake

Delete all the contacts in case they are saved the wrong way

Marking the four contacts

Add a protocol so we can discern between measurements

My magic eight ball to parse measurement names into protocols

Cancel protocol set’s all the choices back to default in case you make an error

Delete all the protocols in case you made a mistake

Then there’s a couple of buttons which could be made context sensitive, because they aren’t needed until you need to assign the zone locations.

Find zones button was supposed to mark any zones it could find

Add a zone (moving is done with the keyboard arrows)

Save the zone locations in the database

Undo all the zones in case you made a mistake (before assigning)

Delete the zone

As you can see there’s a somewhat recurring pattern: create -> store -> delete

Perhaps I could ‘streamline’ this process by making the program assume what the user wants to do after certain actions, but honestly I think that’s far too error prone and we’re talking about science here. Shuttles have exploded for errors like this and we don’t want to fit a pair of orthotics based on erroneous data.

Besides, what computer geek honestly uses buttons anyway? I already added several keyboard accelerators to make very easy to be more productive. Ctrl+F to search, CTRL+O to remove incomplete contacts, 7 (Left Front), 9 (Right Front), 1 (Left Hind), 3 (Right Hind) which map to the anatomical order of the paws :

Ctrl+S to save all the annotations to the database and rinse and repeat. In case there’s a contact you don’t want to have stored, simply don’t annotate it and it won’t get saved. When you save a measurement, it will automagically load the next measurement, to reduce any additional redundant key presses.

How can I improve my paw detection?

Off course, I couldn’t have made this feature without the help of Joe Kington, my Stack Overflow hero, who gave this awesome answer that helped me find and sort my paws. While I personally find the second answer more impressive, I didn’t end up using his principal component analysis, because in its current form it doesn’t perform much better than chance. However, based on the results I’ve gathered so far, I should be able to come up with additional heuristics to make the algorithm perform better.

This also shows why it’s so great to have an application wrapped around all the scripts I had in the beginning, I can extend existing functionality without having to redo a lot of work, because a lot of the foundation required is already in place. For example, the GUI allows me to add multiple panels, which let me easily switch between different views of the same data. If I didn’t have a GUI, I would have had to create several figures or switch between them with a command line interface. You can imagine that performing such tasks are very error prone and quite tedious if you constantly have to pass slightly different arguments to display the data you want.

Back to Joe’s code: his find_paws function while dead simple totally did the job:

Now it’s not flawless, as you can see with the contact in the middle, it’s larger than the smooth radius used by the uniform filter. The result is that it recognizes them as separate contacts. The problem gets worse with human feet when any midfoot contact is lacking, because then it will split up the foot into a rear foot and a forefoot.

While I could make the smoothing radius scale with the size of the dog (or the weight for instance) this is a slippery slope. When the dog is running fast, the front and rear paws land on nearly the same spot almost at the same time. If the smoothing radius is too large, it might ‘merge’ these two prints. As with most algorithms, when you try to optimize for certain cases it’s bound to perform worse in other cases. The ‘easy’ way out is to make it as easy as possible to manually correct the algorithm and using the adjustments as feedback for future corrections.

When you search for the contacts, every contact gets highlighted by a white square. As soon as a contact is annotated with appropriate paw, its color coded accordingly. On the left we see a list of all the found contacts, which shows the duration of the contact (in frames), maximal force (in Newtons) and the maximal size of the surface (in cm). Originally I thought this list might be useful so you can see the differences between contacts, but I found I never looked at the list.

Instead, I’d use the comparing tool at the bottom. What it does is compare the currently selected contact (yellow square) with average representations of the already annotated contacts. It also predicts what contact it probably is based on a simple subtraction: subtract the selected contact pixel by pixel from the other contacts, the one with the smallest difference is likely to match it most likely. I’m sure there’s a better comparison, like using PCA, compare all the frames, not just the maximal values or comparing multiple values, but honestly I found that after annotating 2/3 contacts the comparison would do a pretty good job and otherwise even I had a hard to ‘guesstimate’ which contact is resembled most.

Something that might be of use, like someone suggested on Stack Overflow, is using Inverse Kinematics because if two paws are in contact with the ground, the next contact can’t be one of those two. This should greatly reduce the amount of options at any given point in time. Furthermore, in a lot of cases there’s a clear pattern in which the paws are placed, i.e. Right Front, Left Hind, Left Front, Right Hind etc. One might even wonder if the measurements where this pattern doesn’t occur was even a valid one. Obviously, this doesn’t hold in all cases, because some dogs inherently walk seemingly random, alternating between a normal and an amble pattern.

Another important feature is the adding of protocols, which is basically a way to tag measurements. For instance when I try to fit someone a pair of running shoes or orthotics, I’d generally measure them both barefooted and shod, walking and running and wearing several shoe models or variations of an orthotic. This means I can’t calculate an average over all these different ‘protocols’, because they have very different results. My current version can only sort measurements based on one protocol and while technically I could add a slew of protocols like ‘Barefoot Walking’ to create what I want, but you can understand the list can become very long if I’d need to make combinations for every type or brand of shoe…

Peak detection in a 2D array

After processing all the measurements, the results get calculated. One of the results is calculating an average contact for each paw with the same protocol. This has several advantages, because loading all 3D arrays for each contact with the same protocol is quite data intensive. Furthermore, I’m mostly interested in average results not in single contacts, so I might as well compute the average up front. Now I understand this is an enormous data reduction, but as you’ll see next it comes with a similarly enormous advantage: I only have to set the toe’s positions (zones) once per paw!

You can image that with 4 paws and 5 zones and 2 protocols, it would become very laborious if I’d have to set the zones for every contact with the same protocol. Now I only need to set 40 zones, whereas else it would have probably been at least 200 per dog(!).

Now there might be a lot of improvements I could make with regards to the averaging. Currently I’m not making any corrections, while slight paw rotations and shape differences effect the average. Rotations mean the toes aren’t aligned and it might increase the average’s values between the toes and lower those of the toes. The shape differences, for instance when the rear toe wasn’t fully loaded, would result in a ‘shorter’ contact. Since the arrays start behind the contact, this means the toes would end up half way through the average contact.

Again though, it would probably be a better decision to ignore any extreme outliers, unless the variation is more the rule than the exception. One possible solution would be to rotate and translate the contacts to have the optimal overlap. An interesting method I’d love to use is this form of shape matching, where any shape is transformed to a time series. I can then figure out how to transform the contact so they get a better overlap, which in this case would be the smallest Euclidean distance. Obviously thinking up ways to do so is easier said than done, but these calculations can be used for other purposes down the line as well, like tracking motion.